Great features you probably aren’t using in Google Keep

Use all these clever tips and tricks for Google Keep

Why would there be great features you aren’t using? Because you probably haven’t realised they exist, or you haven’t looked at the feature list for months. See how many of these you know.

Move notes to the top

Google Keep adds notes to the top and older ones are pushed down. However, sometimes those older notes are important ones and they become out of sight and out of mind when they disappear off the bottom of the screen or browser. They become hard to find.

There are two solutions and one is to move the mouse over the top right corner of the note and then click the pin. Pinned notes always appear at the top.

The other way is to drag important or edited notes to the top. It is not obvious, but you can click and drag notes to someplace else and drop them. The other notes scoot around to make space for them. Move them up, move them down, wherever suits you best.

If you use the Google Keep app on mobile, long press on a note and then drag it to a new location up or down the notes list.

Shortcut to add labels to notes

Click the three dots in the toolbar at the bottom of a Google Keep note and a menu is displayed. Select Add label to add a label. You can add anything you like to categorise notes, such as work, personal, ideas, projects, to-do and so on.

If you have ever tried to enter a hash (#) into a note you will have discovered that it displays a list of the labels you have defined. Click a label with the mouse, use the up/down arrow keys to select a label, or type the first letter or two. After selecting a label, hit Tab to enter it into the note.

This adds the label as a #label, but it also adds a label in the bottom right corner of the note and the text you entered, such as #label, can be deleted. Mouse over it for more options.

Instantly filter notes

After adding labels to a note, clicking any label on any note instantly filters all the notes using that label. To cancel the filter and return to normal, click in the search box and click the cross icon on the right.

See created and edited dates

Click a note to open it and there is a date in the bottom right corner. Let the mouse hover over the date and it shows both the date the note was created and when it was last edited. It could be useful on occasions.

Remind you at a location

Is there something you need to do when you get to work, home or someplace else? Write it on a note and set a location reminder. Notes are synced with the app on Android phones and the iPhone, so you will get the notification even if you are not at your computer.

Click a note to open it and then click the first icon in the toolbar at the bottom. You might see your home and work addresses on the list and a reminder at these locations takes just one more click.

To be reminded elsewhere, click Select Place and then enter an address. Anything you can enter into Google Maps will work, so airports and train stations, addresses of buildings, postcodes and zip codes and so on, are all OK.

Use keyboard shortcuts with Keep

Quick searches and things

Click in the search box at the top and several panels are displayed and these contain quick searches. For example, clicking a type, such as Reminders, Lists, Images or URLs displays notes containing those items.

Labels are fairly obvious and you can also search by colours. Just click a colour at the bottom to show all notes set to that background colour.

The Things panel is interesting. Google Keep uses a bit of artificial intelligence to discover what content each note contains. Click Food for example, and notes containing references to food are displayed. Click Places and any notes that contain addresses are displayed. Try the different items in Things.

The Things panel is a great way to quickly filter notes based on their content, and you don’t even need to categories it, it is automatic.

Rich link previews

When web links are saved, such as from the mobile app, Keep can simply save the URL to a note or it can include rich link previews - a preview image of the web page you saved. Some people will prefer plain links and others will like rich previews.

Click Settings in the left panel and at the bottom is a checkbox to enable or disable rich link previews.